As we mentioned in our fourth post, Stakeholder Assessment is a useful tool for ‘mapping’ overlapping and conflicting demands for the same water. But once basic requirements have been met (i.e., in terms of quantity and quality of water), how should the relevant parties organize their interactions? Does each side push ahead and seek to [...]Read More »

In our last post, we described the value of a carefully structured Stakeholder Assessment as a tool for identifying relevant stakeholders, as well as their interests, in a conflict. It can also be used to identify facts in contention or missing information– i.e. ‘what the parties know or think they know about the problem?’ In [...]Read More »

Water is used for agricultural purposes, household needs, energy generation, transportation, recreation, and environmental protection. If there were an unlimited supply of high quality water available all the time, there would be no need to prioritize among these competing uses. However, as demand outstrips supply and uncertainty about how much water there will be in [...]Read More »

The Academy – founded by Plato and transformed into the modern University – is an ideal institution to cultivate, create, and disseminate universal knowledge. Water Diplomacy is an idea – conceived by a group of reflective water scholars and professionals in Boston in 2006 – with an ambitious goal to explore new ways to “think [...]Read More »

The Prince Sultan Bin Abdulaziz International Prize for Water (PSIPW) is an international award focusing on water-related scientific innovation and judged by leading scientists from around the world. Five prizes are bestowed every two years to researchers and research teams for their achievements across the 5 award categories. The awards range in value from US$133,000 [...]Read More »

Complex problems are connected with many competing and often conflicting values, interests, and tools. These problems can’t be addressed through simply applying dogmatic principles or a deal-making purely pragmatic approach. Because these problems are interconnected and interdependent, a final solution can’t be pre-specified. Any intervention to a complex problem requires attention to both principles and pragmatism. [...]Read More »

Challenging the Public/Private Dichotomy of Water Management Cochabamba, Bolivia is famous for its 2000 “Water Wars”, in which a popular revolt successfully fought to throw out Bechtel Corporation and rejected the World Bank’s privatization scheme for urban water systems in the country. The Bechtel subsidiary had imposed dramatic price increases overnight that led to [...]Read More »

This article is the second installment of the series Water Diplomacy: Issues of Complexity Science and Negotiation Theory -- Water disputes are difficult to resolve because they are complex. These disputes occur in open and changing systems with numerous stakeholders, interactions, and interdependencies that make it difficult to anticipate or manage complex systems. One aspect of complexity has to do with uncertainty in how the networks and systems involved are likely to respond to stresses, such asRead More »

This year marked the 25th anniversary of the World Water Week organized by the Stockholm International Water Institute (SIWI) in Sweden. The event lived up to its past reputation as a key event for gathering water practitioners, scientists, global experts, financiers, diplomats and politicians from around the world. From transboundary water perspective, this year also saw [...]Read More »

This article is the first installment of the series Water Diplomacy: Issues of Complexity Science and Negotiation Theory -- Farmers in California’s Central Valley prominently display signs along the highway reading “Congress created this dustbowl,” while, in Los Angeles, the water conservation mascot “Lawn Dude”, prominently displayed on billboards in and around the city, reminds residents to stick within regulated limits for watering their lawns. Though the drought itself is not record-breaking, a combination of severe groundwater depletion, water shortages along the Colorado River, and rising heat (and thus evaporation) have created a critical water supply problem for the stateRead More »